FAQ

Featured Giveaways

You must have between 3 and 5 physical books (paperback or hardback) or eBooks to give away

You must be willing to ship the books to the winners, US residencies only, in a timely manner. (Contact us if you’re going to be on tour or in other circumstances that make the shipping difficult – we can usually work something out.)

If you are featuring an eBook, you must be willing to deliver eBooks and mail provided postcards in a timely manner.

All winning physical books need to be signed and all postcards need to be personalized and signed

The book should be in an acceptable genre (see the “What genres are accepted” question on this page)

We are currently accepting all Fiction genres and Non-Fiction memoirs.

Also, we try to keep Free Book Friday a family friendly site as we do have an audience that includes families and young readers (13 years old and up). That said, we do not accept erotica or other adult oriented material that we feel would be inappropriate for our audience.

If you feel like your book is on the edge, feel free to send us an email to info@freebookfriday.com (including a link to purchase your book) before you complete your submission and we’ll gladly check it out.

If you have purchased a package or advertisement and your submission is deemed inappropriate, we’ll contact as soon as possible and provide a full refund.

FBF 2013 now allows you to view our schedule and select an available date for your Featured Giveaway for our Reservation, Deluxe and Premium packages.

From our Packages and Pricing page, select click the “Reserve your date and sign up” button, and you’ll be directed to a page where you can select the month you’d like your giveaway to launch.

Clicking on the month will show you all the available launch dates that begin that month. If you don’t see a particular launch date, unfortunately that means it’s been sold out – we max out at 5 Featured Giveaways per week.

Once you decide on an available launch date, click the Select Options button to go to the Featured Giveaway Details page, where you can select your Package Type (Reservation, Deluxe or Premium) and complete the checkout process.

And after you check out, you’ll see a link to the online form (we’ll also email it to you) where you can provide all the information for your Featured Giveaway.

1. Fill out the sign up form
After purchasing, you’ll be directed to an online form that captures all the information we need to build your Featured Giveaway. This includes the author, book title, author bio, exclusive written Q&A (you get to choose the questions), book summary and links to purchase.

2. We’ll review your submission & confirm
After you submit the online form, we’ll review everything to make sure your Feature will look great, and get in touch via email to let you know we’re all set, or to follow up on any details.

3. We’ll send you the link to your Feature
When we get closer to your feature date, we’ll build it in the system and send you a link to the soon-to-be-published post, so you can begin creating your own promotional materials.

4. Your Feature goes live
Features go live on Saturdays at 12:01am Eastern time.

5. You get tons of exposure!
Your feature will be up on the site from Saturday to Friday. And we’ll make sure you get a prominent spot in our weekly email newsletter to all our subscribers.

6. We pick the winners
Around midnight on Thursday night/Friday morning, we’ll pick the winners and display their first names on the post. We’ll also email them with the good news and request their mailing address.

7. We’ll send you a recap
After your Feature has completed, we’ll send over a recap email to confirm its completion and let you know how it went.

8. We consolidate all the winner mailing addresses
We’ll keep on our lucky winners until we get all their mailing addresses. And by the next Friday we’ll send all the ones we’ve collected over to you so you can sign the books (or postcards) and mail them out. Most of the time we’ll have everyone’s address within the week.

9. You mail the books to the winners
Once you get the mailing addresses and/or email addresses (for eBooks) from us, you’ll send them out to the winners. Please make every effort to have the books out within 30 days of receiving the addresses. Our readers get super excited when they win and they can’t wait to crack open their new titles! If you are featuring an eBook, we will also mail you FBF postcards (postage included!) to personalize, sign and mail out as well.

10. We’ll both bask in the glory of another successful online promotion!

Yes. This is the “hook” of our site. “Free autographed copies.” If you are a publisher or publicist, you must make arrangements to have the books signed before they are delivered to us or the winners. In the past, some publishers have sent the unsigned books to their authors for signature and included a pre-paid shipping label for the books to be forwarded on to the winners. Book plates are also acceptable if that is easier. Again, if you are featuring an eBook, we will provide you with postcards to sign and send.

Once the giveaway has ended, we will collect the mailing addresses from the winners and send them to you so you can mail the books. To keep shipping costs low, we only accept winners from the U.S.

Please make every effort to have the books/postcards in the mail or sent out within 30 days of receiving the addresses. Our readers get super excited when they win and they can’t wait to crack open their new titles!

If you are unable to mail the books out to the winners, please contact us so we can work something out.

We max out at 5 giveaways to minimize the “burn out” factor for our readers. Ideally we want everyone who visits the site to read and sign up to win on all the Featured Giveaways hosted each week. Any more than 5 giveaways and we risk overwhelming our audience and reducing engagement.

Advertising

The Email Newsletter ad placement is a tall, thin rectangle while most book covers are short, wide rectangles. Forcing your book cover into the Email Newsletter ad format would distort the image beyond recognition, which defeats the whole purpose of posting the ad. And it’s why we require a specially designed ad to go in this placement. Check out our 3 Tips for Email Newsletter Ads and How to Create an Eye-Catching Ad for your Book articles on our Author Resources page for some great tips and tricks on creating ads for your book.

There are tons of great designers out there that can help you design your ad. We highly recommend Nicki from Multi-Designs – she’s been helping us since the very beginning. (She also designs great author swag!) You can also check out 99Designs.com where you can host a design contest, or even Craigslist to find a local designer near you.

General

Yes! We are now featuring eBook giveaways which include our FBF postcards (signed by you!) to be that little “something extra” for our readers. You can also always Advertise on Free Book Friday, or host your own giveaway and promote it on Freebie Central.

We accept all major credit cards, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. If you prefer to receive an e-mail or paper invoice and pay by check, please let us know and we can make arrangements to accommodate you.